Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia: Scholar Gary Saul Morson sees disturbing parallels between Russia before the Revolution and contemporary America.

Wall Street Journal ^ | June 5, 2020 | Barton Swaim

[karpov]

The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. [...] The riots of 1992 were mostly confined to poor and working-class areas of Los Angeles. This week saw mayhem all over America, and in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere the rioters targeted wealthy streets and neighborhoods.

But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody else.

Gary Saul Morson says he has no special insight regarding police actions and the death of George Floyd. But he does have a provocative thesis about America’s current political moment: “To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”

Mr. Morson, 72, is a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern University and an accomplished interpreter of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Obviously we haven’t arrived at anything like what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation,” Mr. Morson says, but we have arrived at a situation in which well-intentioned liberal people often can’t bring themselves to say that lawless violence is wrong.

In late czarist Russia, some political parties and other groups—the Social Democrats, the anarchists, the Marxists—explicitly endorsed terrorism. “The liberal party—the Constitutional Democrats, they called themselves—did not condone terrorism,” Mr. Morson says. “But they refused to condemn it. And indeed they called for the release from prison of all terrorists

[stinkerpot65]

Violence is now a political tool for Democrats. It will increase.

[2banana]

Except the white russians are much better armed and organized.

[livius]

Not organized at all. This is a brilliant article and shows you exactly how these radicals took over moderates without their even knowing it...And even conquered the opposition party, which didn’t want to look bad by opposing them. Sound familiar?

So where is the organization? I don’t think we have one. One may emerge, but I honestly don’t know where it is right now. I think we’re in for some bad times.

[Robert DeLong]

“To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”

Then when strongman Stalin gained control:

The Great Purge, also known as the “Great Terror,” took place killing a vast number of intellectuals.

The same will happen here.

[livius]

I have been reading a lot of things saying this is the start of our October 1917. I certainly think so.

This is a great article, btw. I read it this morning in the print edition...thanks for posting it.

[Manuel OKelley]

If the good guys had been armed like we are Lenin would be a minor footnote in history

[Thilly Thailor]

Not even close. The Bolsheviks knew they couldn’t win until Russia was in a total state of collapse. That happened only after three years of genocidal warfare with the Germans. Millions died on the front. The economy couldn’t cope and so it died. There was starvation all across the vast Russian lands. Only under such conditions can the Communists win. They’d love to create those conditions, but they’re not capable of pulling that off. Not by a long shot.

[neverevergiveup]

“Violence is now a political tool for Democrats. It will increase.”

Yes, until there is the kind of push-back that will destroy their resolve. That's inevitable. There are profound numbers of us who would be willing to lose everything, and die, rather than to accept a take-over by the scum who want to destroy this nation.

There is a huge difference between starting a revolution against a royal oligarchy vs against the freedom of the American Republic. Night and day. Further, the vast majority of Americans live a life without horrible want or need (except for spiritual emptiness - but this is different issue). The other extremely important thing against the left is that, unlike when the Bolsheviks were pushing Communism, most of us know how destructive and wrong Marxism is. There's a record Marxists have to defend, and it's indefensible.

[laconic]

The big difference here is we have a Second Amendment and Russia did not. Also Russia was in a disastrous war, run by two idiots (the tsar and empress were decent people but totally inept), and you lacked communications outside the major cities. Plus food was in shortage in the major cities. That said, get prepared for major insurrection, land confiscations, and ever louder complaints styled as injuries caused by racism or our history.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Uh oh.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Uh oh.

[MotorCityBuck]

Bingo. Not even close. Scholars. What don’t they know. 😂

[E. Pluribus Unum]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

[ought-six]

I posted a couple days ago that what is happening in the U.S. today is akin to Russia 1917.

[marktwain]

Not even close. The Bolsheviks knew they couldn’t win until Russia was in a total state of collapse. That happened only after three years of genocidal warfare with the Germans. Millions died on the front. The economy couldn’t cope and so it died. There was starvation all across the vast Russian lands. Only under such conditions can the Communists win. They’d love to create those conditions, but they’re not capable of pulling that off. Not by a long shot.

Glad you said it before I had to.

It is much easier for a people to replace an elite, than for an elite to replace its people.

The deep state/media/academic elite are overrated. They have lied to themselves for so long, they believe their own lies. They are not well-rooted in reality.

They are desperate at the potential loss of power, but it is not the desperation of facing the noose or firing squad. They are pampered and soft.

[Dogbert41]

Trump needs to take out some of these head snakes immediately. All these traitor generals come to mind right now, and it would be a good move to lock them up tonight.

[livius]

I think of this idiotic dictatorial lockdown as having been the equivalent of the societal breakdown and shortages that occurred before the Russian Revolution. And while we have the Second Amendment, I’m not sure the firepower is up to that of the state. And the generals have publicly turned on the President, so we can’t look for help there.

I think it can still be stopped, mostly because it still doesn’t have an indivual leader. There are many forces behind it but as yet no leader or even figurehead. Of course, one may emerge.

Very dangerous times. And it all happened so fast.

[tet68]

There are similarities but not that many.
100 years ago the communists were in a civil war
they won but knew enough to not use the same tactics
for world revolution. They have been preparing the
battlefield for 100 years and these “protests” are
just the beginning, I think it’s too early and will
set them back another 50 years before they try again,
they will try again.

[Thilly Thailor]

Exactly.

Can you imagine these ANTIFA dweebs trying to do real Bolshevik stuff, like storming factories or maybe going out in armed columns to rob peasants of their last few pounds of flour to feed their workers?

ANTIFA - the armed wing of the DNC - is ridiculous. They're a bunch of fat teenagers with katana fantasies. And those are the most "dangerous" ones they have. Add to that morbidly obese special education teachers and we see what a threat they are.

We, in sharp contrast, have a half a billion privately-owned firearms and the cops & veterans to use them. We can feed ourselves from a vast, functioning agriculture and supply ourselves from a myriad of factories and workshops all over my beloved Flyover owned and operated by our fellow Deplorables.

They are wholly dependent on us. They are parasitical on us. If the flare ever goes up, they'd all be swinging from lampposts in a few days.